The Cobra Event (38 page)

“See, Will, that’s forsythia…” She raised her eyes. The back of a brick building rose beyond the flower bed, a four-story building that had been renovated. Fairly new double-paned windows with metal casings had been installed on all the floors. On the third floor, the windows were covered with brilliant white shades, and there was a small, high-tech fan whirring in one of them.

They sat on the merry-go-round, stunned with surprise.

“Oh, my,” Hopkins said, “oh, my.”

He stood up slowly. “Don’t stare. Walk casually.”

They walked out of the park, moving like two people with nothing to do. They crossed the street and turned back, and looked at the front of the building. It was a small turn-of-the-century apartment building, faced with yellowish brick, with a heavy cornice running along the top. All the windows on the third floor were covered with white shades. It was a well-kept building, but it did not have an elevator. “You’d have to carry equipment up and down the stairs, but it’s doable,” Hopkins remarked. “Let’s check the buzzer.” They went up the steps and looked at names on the buzzer. None of them was Cope. The button for apartment number three said “Vir.”

They crossed the street again and stood facing the building. Hopkins put his hands in his pockets and slouched.

“
Vir
means ‘man’ in Latin,” Austen commented.

The front door of the building suddenly opened.

TOM COPE WAS
carrying his black leather doctor’s bag, his little joke. He saw them as he was going out the front door. A woman and a man standing across the street and staring intently at him. Instantly he changed his mind. He turned around and went back into the hallway. Am I imagining things?

Hopkins saw the door open, and he locked eyes with a modest-looking man wearing eyeglasses, with hair going thin, pale skin, and a face that was burned into his mind. He reached under his jacket for his gun and started to glide for the door, no pause between the identification of the suspect and the movement toward an arrest.

Austen grabbed him. “Dammit. Don’t. He was carrying something.”

Hopkins stopped. She was right. If a guy has a bomb, you don’t just try to arrest him. “Get off to the side,” he said to her. He half-pushed her back into a doorway. He pressed her into the corner of the door and kept his body over her, shielding her. “He may be armed,” he told her. “It’s time for you to leave.”

“No.”

“Then sit down on the steps, Alice. Keep your body mass close to the wall.” He sat down next to her. “Okay. We’re waiting for a friend who lives here. We’re just sitting on the steps, hanging out, okay? Blah, dee blah, blah, we’re talking, okay? Smile. That’s it, smile! I need to use my radio.” Hopkins twisted his body and hunched over. He switched his Saber radio to the emergency channel and got an F.B.I. dispatcher. “It’s Special Agent Will Hopkins. Get me Frank Masaccio! This is extremely urgent!”

Then: “Frank! We’re in the East Village, near Houston Street.” He looked around, gave the address. “We’ve got him! Cope. We saw him carrying some kind of bag. We have him under surveillance. He seems to be going under the alias Vir. V-I-R. I need massive backup. Massive! He may have a bomb. I’m sitting in a doorway here with Dr. Austen.”

“Hopkins. Number one: you’re fired. Number two: you’re a better street agent than your old man.” Frank Masaccio was standing in the Command Center of the F.B.I. offices in the Federal Building. “I’m sending you everything I’ve got.”

Surveillance

TOM COPE
raced up the stairs to his apartment, lugging his bag. He bolted the door and sat down on a couch in the living room, with the bag resting on the couch beside him. They were staring at me as if they knew. They just
looked
federal. They cannot possibly be the F.B.I. There’s no way they can have found me. But why were they staring at me like that?

He stood up and went over to a shaded window. Do I dare look? He pulled back the shade an inch or so and looked out onto the street. Did they leave?

He saw them. They were sitting in a doorway across the street. They seemed to be talking.

He returned to the couch. This is
crazy
, he thought. I’m going crazy. Get ahold of yourself, you’re being paranoid.

Oh, shit. The timers in the bombs were running. He should disarm them. To do that, he had to go back into Level 3. Damn! Several minutes later, inside the hot lab, all suited up, he opened the bombs and removed the timers and disconnected the wires. Then he went out of Level 3, carrying the bombs. He washed his suit and the bombs with the bleach sprayer in the staging-area hallway before he took off the suit and discarded it in a plastic bag.

He sat down again on the couch to try to gather his thoughts. He placed a bomb tube full of viral glass on a coffee table in front of him. He removed the Colt Delta Elite from the bag and placed it where he could reach it in an instant.

Outside, Hopkins and Austen continued to sit in the doorway. A woman came along and had to practically step over them to get inside her building. “Why don’t you sit somewhere else,” she said.

Hopkins said to Austen, “Don’t look at Cope’s apartment.” It was getting dark.

HE DREW BACK THE SHADE
slightly, and looked up and down the street. He couldn’t see the man and the woman now. Why do I feel so afraid? He debated whether to make his move downward through the emergency exit. He needed to go to ground. If he could get into the subway system he could disappear.

Still, he couldn’t bring himself to move. If he failed, he would fall into the hands of either the F.B.I. or BioArk. He began to hope it was the F.B.I. He would rather go to federal prison than meet some of those people from BioArk. How can I have allowed myself to be trapped in my building? he thought. Am I trapped? Again he pulled aside a shade, and looked out the window. The man and the woman had moved. They were sitting in a different doorway. Why wouldn’t they leave?

FRANK MASACCIO
had called the Washington headquarters of the F.B.I. He explained that Agent Hopkins had gone AWOL from Governors Island but had apparently found the terrorist. “He and the doctor are on site.” He said he was rushing a Surveillance Operations Group into the area. The Reachdeep operations people and additional Hostage Rescue Teams were moving into place. Essentially the entire New York field office was joining the operation, and he called for extra help from Quantico. At the same time, some of his agents were starting to run checks on people who lived in apartments near Cope. The agents were trying to get a sense of who the neighbors were and what the neighborhood was like. “We’re going to try to gain access to a common wall with Cope’s apartment,” Masaccio said to the Washington S
IOC
group.

A cable television repair van pulled up on the corner of Avenue C. The driver looked straight at Hopkins, and nodded slightly. Hopkins and Austen stood up from the doorway. They walked to the corner, the back of the van opened, and they climbed inside.

Oscar Wirtz was sitting in the back of the van. He was dressed in a gray sweat suit. The van pulled away.

Simultaneously, an old pickup truck full of junk furniture stopped in front of Cope’s building and double-parked on the street. A Hispanic man and an African-American woman were sitting in the cab of the pickup. They were shabbily dressed. The woman had something in her ear that looked like a hearing aid. She was talking with Frank Masaccio, and her voice was carrying live into S
IOC
in Washington. “There’s no activity on the third floor,” she said.

The cable television van carrying Austen, Hopkins, and Wirtz double-parked on a quiet cross street two blocks from Cope’s apartment. Suddenly a large furniture-delivery truck appeared and parked in front of the television van, Hopkins and Austen got out and climbed into the back of the furniture truck. Mark Littleberry and a number of Oscar Wirtz’s people—the Reachdeep operational squad—were inside. There were many boxes of biohazard gear in the truck. For the moment, the furniture truck was a staging and supply area for a biohazard operation.

“Are we going into action?” Austen said.

“Not you, Dr. Austen,” Wirtz said to her.

Hopkins was listening to Masaccio on a Saber radio.

“The lady below him is a shut-in and she has diabetes and a heart condition,” Masaccio was saying. “We can’t disturb her. We can’t get into the apartment above him without risking discovery—he may notice us going past him. On one side of the building there’s an open lot. It extends around the building and down to Houston Street. This is bad luck. It’s open ground, and he could see us moving there. The good news is the building on the other side of him. This building shares a common wall with his building. So we’re going into the building next to him. We’re going to try to get as close to him as we can, Will Junior. You tell your guy Wirtz to get ready to move fast in a very hot mess.”

The sun had set. It was eight-thirty in the evening.

BEFORE MAKING ANY MOVE
to arrest Cope, they wanted to learn more about his state of mind and his weapons, and look at him visually. Another truck pulled up near Tom Cope’s building. It was a Con Edison repair truck. Three Con Edison employees in hard hats—one was a woman, the other two were men—entered the building next to his. When they got to the third floor, they knocked on an apartment door. A man answered. They pulled out their F.B.I. credentials. It turned out that he was a columnist for a rap music magazine.

The Con Edison woman held up her F.B.I. creds. “My name is Caroline Landau. I’m an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She introduced her colleagues.

“What do you want with me?” the journalist said.

Landau was firm about needing his help. She explained that there was a killer next door, through the wall. “We think he has a bomb,” she said. “This is no joke. We’re appealing to you for help.”

The man seemed unable to speak. Finally he stammered, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I swear to you this is the truth.”

“I can’t believe this,” he said.

“I’m pleading personally with you, sir,” Caroline Landau said. “Sir, you are in very great personal danger. We all are.”

He had a feeling that he wasn’t really being given a choice. He went downstairs with one of the “Con Edison” people, and the truck carried him away. He spent the night at a hotel, courtesy of the F.B.I.

Apartment by apartment, floor by floor, the F.B.I. evacuated the building next to Tom Cope’s. They did not dare try to evacuate his building, for fear he would notice—except the first floor, where a single woman was living. They got her out. Debriefing her in the staging truck, they learned from her that the man on the third floor was going under the name of Harald Vir, and that he did not socialize with anyone in the building, although he was very polite. That was Tom Cope.

In the journalist’s apartment, Caroline Landau set up her remote sensing gear, working with a group of tech agents. Out of their Con Edison repair boxes they took a silent drilling machine. It could cut through brick and stone without making a sound. They cut through a layer of Sheetrock on the wall, and removed the material in pieces and set it aside. Under it was insulation. They pulled out the insulation. The apartment was getting trashed. Next they came to a brick wall. It was a common wall. On the other side of the brick wall was Cope’s apartment.

Caroline Landau set out an array of contact microphones on the brick wall. These microphones were the size of nickels. They picked up sounds in Cope’s apartment and fed them into an analyzer. You could listen on headphones and hear everything happening in his apartment, in stereo sound, with a sense of brilliant depth.

The furniture truck containing Hopkins, Austen, Wirtz, Littleberry, and the Reachdeep operational ninjas in it swung around the block and parked on the sidewalk near Cope’s building. Under cover of darkness, moving with great speed, they unloaded a series of duffel bags and brought them into the building next to Cope’s. They hurried them upstairs to the third floor, where the F.B.I. technical surveillance operation was now getting started.

Special Agent Landau and her crew set up two thermal imaging cameras on tripods. The cameras resembled video cameras, except that the lenses were huge and had gold mirrors in them. The lenses looked like giant golden frog eyes. The cameras could see in infrared light, which is heat. They could see warmth through walls, and see it clearly.

Landau wired the thermal-imaging cameras to display screens. A thermal image of Tom Cope’s apartment appeared on the screens. Now they could see Cope walking around. He was in the living room, holding an object in his hands. He moved quickly and smoothly from place to place. He seemed calm, at least from all they could tell by looking at his shape.

They saw a large, warm cylinder in another room, and they thought it might be a bioreactor. To get a better look at it, the tech agents silently drilled a cone-shaped hole in the bricks. It took a while for their cutter to penetrate the brick, and they were fearful that the faint humming noise it made would alert Cope. Eventually the cutter had driven the hole to a point just under the paint surface in Cope’s apartment. They were looking at a bit of paint from the back side, from the inner surface of the paint. They broke through the paint with a pin. This made a pinhole in the paint at the point of the cone-shaped hole in the bricks. Then they slid a cone-shaped optical assembly into the hole, so that the point of the assembly just penetrated the pinhole in the paint. The point of the cone was actually a fish-eye lens as small as a pencil point. Everything else in the optical assembly was behind the wall surface and invisible to Cope. Even if Cope had looked directly at the fish-eye lens he might not have noticed it. He might have thought it was a speck of dirt.

“We’re a fly on his wall,” Caroline Landau remarked.

The optical cone was connected to an electronic imaging system. On a flat screen appeared a fish-eye view of Tom Cope’s laboratory.